Winter, Badgers know, can be the longest nine months of any year, at least in Wisconsin. But just because it’s cold outside, you don’t have to be cold inside. Engineering professor Douglas Reindl MS’88, PhD’92 is the UW’s HVAC expert, and though his specialty is refrigeration — he founded the Industrial Refrigeration Consortium — his knowledge extends to heating. “I work mostly on making stuff cold,” he says, but “occasionally I make stuff warm, too.” Here are his top seven tips for efficiently warming your home.
- Close your curtains at night. “When the shades and curtains are open, your body’s radiating to a cold nighttime, and that makes you feel colder. One way of guarding against that radiative heat loss is to close the curtains, as silly as that might sound.”
- A sweatshirt is better than a space heater. “You should keep your thermostat set below 70 — 68 would be great — and put on a sweatshirt. If you run a space heater all the time, that tends to offset the gains of lowering your thermostat.”
- Close the damper. “If you have rooms you aren’t using, close off the supply air damper in those rooms. This helps reduce warm air delivered to rooms unoccupied while delivering to the space(s) you’re occupying.”
- Change your furnace filter. “If you have a furnace/air conditioning system that was running all summer, and now the filter is all loaded up, it’s going to reduce air flow. That makes it harder to move air and to get heat into your living space.”
- Keep the vents clear. “If you have a furnace, check the combustion vent to ensure it is clear from snow drifts or other debris. If you have a heat pump, make sure that the outdoor unit isn’t buried in snow. If it’s clear, that will allow the unit to pull air across the heat exchanger.”
- Check your caulk. “You should have done this before winter, but check your caulk around window and other penetrations to your home. Sealing up these openings helps maintain the building envelope to minimize cold air leaking into your home.”
- Put plastic over the windows. “It might seem ridiculous, and you might not like the look, but sealing leaky windows with plastic on the interior is cost effective, and it actually works. Window sealing kits are readily available and not too expensive. The plastic is easily removed when winter is over.”
